


A 3am Love Letter to the Boy Across the Street

by elpis_in_darkness



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:34:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28186209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elpis_in_darkness/pseuds/elpis_in_darkness
Summary: We fell in love thirteen years ago and I don't think we ever fell out of it.
Kudos: 2





	A 3am Love Letter to the Boy Across the Street

I'm always a little stunned at the balance the universe offers. It deals out vicious, slashing wounds that fester for months, for years, for what feels like lifetimes, and then, almost as an apology, like a cat licking the skin it just bit -- because that's what cats do -- it offers up an impossibility as a gift. 

We met in 2006, fourteen years ago.

I had spent the last three years in italy, inhaling the smell of garbage leaking into the streets from the constant workers' strikes and the soft, sharp scent of the mediterranean sea. I ate so much garlic, which, to this day, I'm positive leaked into my veins and my organs enough that mosquitos didn't touch me for years. Crumbling greek and roman ruins haunted our backyard. Our landlord had a vineyard and fig trees. We made lemonade using the massive lemons growing on the tree by our door. We got adopted by our downstairs neighbor's dog, whose name I still use as the base of most of my passwords.

Then one summer we packed away our lives into boxes and suitcases and left. 

I kept a sketchpad in my backpack, next to my battered copy of The Two Towers, where I would obsessively draft out my future bedroom. Dad had managed to get a rough floorplan of our new house and I spent weeks reorganizing the two-dimensional layout.

Looking back, this was one of my ways of coping with the anxiety brought on by moving to a vastly different culture, halfway around the world. I was thirteen and terrified and excited in all the most awkward ways.

Our new little slice of pretend America was surrounded by looming buildings made of steel and glass. The air was always thick with smog and the sound of millions of cars. My throat was suffocated by the heavy summer heat mixed with inhumane levels of humidity. I couldn't sleep the first few nights because the cicadas screeched so loudly.

I kind of hated it. 

But I made friends pretty easily. 

And then I met Josh.

I wish I could remember the exact moment and situation, like those people in romantic stories always seem to be able to do, but I can't. 

Instead, the memories are scattered and a little faded, but they still feel so so precious, like the dried up rose I still have from when Josh left it on my windowsill for valentine's day. 

I remember sitting in geography? social studies? maybe it was math. Who knows. Our teacher was Ms. Brown.

Our class sat in groups of four, all facing in towards each other. We were in different clumps, but we still sat next to each other, only a small river of scratchy grey carpet separating us. We passed notes back and forth in that timeless way all teenagers do. 

I'm twenty-seven and half now, but I still have some of the notes, like a written monument to our shy, excited adoration of each other.

I don't remember any of the details, but I remember being in awe of him during english class. We would have those assignments where we had to write something and then read it out loud to the class. 

Josh's stuff always made me smile and feel a little pang of inferiority. I was just so in love with the way he presented things to the rest of us. His word choice, the syntax, the plot, the creativity. It all felt so brilliant.

HE always seemed so brilliant.

I don't remember the details. I just remember that I lived to hear his work read out loud. 

And I remember he took German while I took Spanish. There was a day when his class had bratwurst and I was so so jealous, but I was more jealous that my friend Maddi was in class with him. Because she was cute and shared that class with him while I was stuck a few buildings down. 

I remember he always played basketball with a bunch of the other kids during breaks. 

I used to find excuses to walk by just so I could see his trademarked, semi-permanent smirk while he joked and laughed with his friends, who all felt so much cooler than me. 

Life changed again when a few months into the school year, my family suddenly moved across base into a new house. One that was right across the street from Josh. 

From then on, we started walking home together and sneaking out our bedroom windows to be together. 

There was a little patch of forest right beside his house that looked out on the skyline of the city. Even in the winter, when the trees were bare and scraggly and we had to bundle up in coats and hats and scarves, we would sit and watch the buildings made of steel and glass. We would talk and laugh and orbit another like we thought the other was some sort of human-shaped sun. 

We would sneak out to a nearby playground and sit on the swings for hours to look at the couple of stars that fought hard to be visible through the light pollution of one of the largest cities in the world.

We never really held hands or kissed, but there was an intimacy there that wedged itself into my soul and etched itself deep into my bones. 

We fell in love at thirteen and I don't think we ever really fell out of it. 

We were only in the same place for a year before he moved and I stayed. But I followed him across the world, keeping an eye out on social media. Battling between the urge to wish him well with his new girlfriend or fly to Arizona to rip her throat out with my teeth. 

Being a teenager is hard, I learned.

When we were finally back in the same country at the same time, I almost went to see him. I had the website up to purchase bus tickets from Virginia to Georgia when the universe threw another wrench in our story. 

A year later, I was married to another guy, one I'd met in college the day I was trying to decide whether or not to get on that bus driving south. I figured that was the end of our tale. 

Now it's thirteen years later. I've gone through hell and Josh just joined the navy. I've seen the insides of a psych ward more than once and gotten divorced. I'm living with my parents way out in the desert and the world feels a few select shades of grey. 

Then I accidentally brushed fingers across the marks her left on my bones and a little color seeped back into the world. 

I tried to find him, but he'd been off social media for seven years. I think he's still in Georgia. I don't know if he has a girlfriend or if he's married, but I feel a reckless, desperate need to just see proof that he still exists in the world. 

Suddenly, I'm writing a message to his dad who is on social media. I'm begging the man I've always been a little terrified of for news of his middle son. 

_"Hi Mr. Stephens! You probably (almost definitely) won't remember me, but we lived across the street back in 2007..."_

I wasn't expecting much and also hoping for everything. It still took by surprise when I got a message from Josh the next day. Something settled like molten gold between the tired cracks in my soul. 

Now we talk every few days. I'm texting him during a panic attack because I know hearing from him, even about something completely ordinary, like how his phone battery is almost dead, will help. I'm promising to write him during his basic training and we're half joking about getting married and planning matching tattoos and I'm planning to fly to Chicago for his graduation in April.   
  
Honestly, nothing might continue to happen, but I hope something does -- even if the thought is a little terrifying -- because we fell a little in love thirteen years ago and I don't think either of us ever fell out of it. 


End file.
